CENTRAL CITY, Colorado — It’s a weekday evening, and
the blackjack tables inside the Fortune Valley Casino are empty.
Outside, a handful of cars are scattered in the parking garage and
only a few people are getting off the bus out front. The scene is
typical. The lure of "limited stakes gambling," which Colorado
voters approved in 1990, has followed the pattern of gold mining in
Central City a century ago: boom and bust. In 1992, 18 casinos were
open in Central City; only four operate today.

Limited
stakes gambling, which stipulates $5 maximum bets for all games and
restricted hours of operation for casinos, was intended to help the
towns of Central City, Cripple Creek and Black Hawk attain both
historic preservation and economic survival. Cripple Creek is a few
hours away from Central City, but Black Hawk — once the mill
town for Central’s gold — is just one mile down valley,
and this has made for a heated rivalry. At the onset of gaming,
Black Hawk, with barely 100 people and a gravel main street,
attracted little attention, while Central City struck pay dirt with
small gambling parlors in historic buildings and blackjack dealers
dressed in Victorian garb. Then, in the mid-1990s, Black Hawk
carved out the mountainsides to make room for massive new casinos.

Today, Black Hawk’s 22 casinos are the first stop
for the 50,000 metro Denver slot jockeys who travel 30 minutes up
State Highway 119 each day. Farther up the road, meanwhile, many
Central City casinos have disappeared. In March 2004, Black
Hawk’s casinos brought in $45 million in gambling revenue,
more than ten times Central’s take.

In response,
Central City casinos are building a $40 million road designed to
skirt Black Hawk entirely and get gamblers directly into their
town. The high-stakes investment, which will open this November,
could trigger a new boom for "the Richest Square Mile on Earth,"
but it will also break up a bighorn sheep herd and one of the last
major chunks of open space along Colorado’s crowded Front
Range.

A real estate jackpot

Joe
Behm, chairman of the Central City Business Improvement District
and marketing director for Fortune Valley Casino, estimates that
"up to 500 cars an hour" will drive the new road once it opens this
November; that’s about half the current traffic coming into
Black Hawk on Highway 119.

Those drivers might not all be
coming to gamble: The Central City Parkway will also open up
previously inaccessible and undeveloped land, a rare commodity
along Colorado’s Front Range.

"Once you put a road
in, there’s going to be all other kinds of development," says
Tom Howard of the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Even under rural
zoning codes, there could be dozens and even hundreds of new homes
sprawling across the range of one of the state’s largest
bighorn sheep herds. Howard, whose agency has the bighorn
emblazoned on its emblem, says land fragmentation would devastate
the herd, but it will likely be a jackpot for landowners adjacent
to the road, whose property values have suddenly doubled.

State and federal transportation officials are preparing an
environmental impact statement to address gambling traffic, which
is expected to double over the next 20 years. But they warn that
the Parkway will not solve Central City’s access problems.
The four-lane, 8.3-mile road will creep up slopes at an 8 percent
grade — steep enough to scare off commercial bus carriers.
The Colorado Department of Transportation also says the route will
do nothing to alleviate the astronomical increase in auto accidents
and congestion on Highway 119 since gaming began. In fact, it will
generate more traffic.

But Central City has already
bought a 150-foot wide swath of land running down to Interstate 70,
and the business improvement district has sold a $45 million bond
that will pay to build, maintain, plow and police the road without
any state or federal help.

Meanwhile, transportation
officials suggest building a separate access route — a $150
million tunnel that would pipe gamblers to both towns. Critics say
both new routes will only help destroy the natural and historical
values that gaming was supposed to help preserve.